The Letter Chest - 1. Story

THE

THE

LETTER

CHEST

by corvus

He’s halfway past the sandbox when he can’t remember his way home. The loss is like a blow to the stomach. He slows down but keeps moving, squinting at the grass and sandbox that’s suddenly too bright.

The memory is so close he can almost feel it. It hovers, breath-like, at the edge of his mind. The children in the sandbox distract him, but he is more bothered by the glances of their mothers. They must be wondering who this stuffy old man is, circling like a big foolish bird.

You’re not supposed to go out by yourself.

He knows that, but it’d been such a beautiful day. Granted, it doesn’t seem quite as attractive anymore, now that he is lost God-knows-where in the park.

I’ve told you, George, you should stay inside while I’m gone.

The words are spoken with someone else’s voice, a woman’s, thin, rather high. He frowns, concentrating, but he can’t remember whose it is. Yet they’re familiar, and he feels other words circle eagerly under the surface of his mind. But when he reaches—nothing.

Abruptly, he is tired. There is a bench under one of the maples. He eases into it, one hand on the back and one hand on the railing. His joints are no longer what they used to be. His mind isn’t what it used to be.

“Professor Shaw?”

He sits up and quickly glances over his shoulder; there is no one behind him.

“Professor Shaw?”

“Yes? Hello?” George says.

The man is young, in his late-twenties or so, well-dressed in a fashionable way. He looks concerned. George hobbles to his feet, hovering, torn and uncertain.

“Um, Professor Shaw?”

His heart is in his throat. “Yes?” he manages. Who is this man? Where are they? Is he Professor Shaw? He hates not knowing. He doesn’t want to be seen like this. He wishes he could hide.

“Can I help you?”

“Ah—” It is at his throat to say no, everything is all right. But it isn’t. In fact, everything is wrong. He is a man, an old man who commands respect, and yet he is as helpless as a baby animal.

The silence, he realizes, is rapidly getting awkward.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not sure I remember—how to get back.”

“Oh!” The man looks surprised, and George winces at his expression. “Uh, that’s fine. I can, uh, show you back.” After a pause, he adds, “If you like.”

George nods mutely. What he would really like is to know what the other man’s name is. Who is he? He was not, George noted, bad looking.

“It’s a nice day, isn’t it, Mr. Shaw?”

George nods again. “Yes,” he says, and wishes he doesn’t sound so nervous. He isn’t supposed to be outside, but he is. He can’t remember leaving. He can’t even pinpoint why he is feeling so anxious. He remembers that he is an esteemed professor of twentieth century Irish poetry. He is respected for his ability to recite poems on the spot, spit out analyses with the blink of an eye. He is that, and nothing.

They turned left and walked down a street. George does his best to burn the way into his memory, but there’s almost no need; they stop after only a few steps.

“Well, this is it,” the man says cheerfully.

“Oh yes,” says George. “Thanks very much.” He’s gotten enough of a grasp over himself to smile and reach out a hand, but he stops, at the last moment, before clapping the other man’s back.

“It’s no problem,” the other man says.

“Mm-hmm,” says George, waiting.

“Well, see you around then.”

“Bye-bye,” said George.

The other man walks down the pavement and turns up the driveway of the next house. It’s suddenly clear: this man is their neighbor. George frowns as he considers what the neighbor must think of this. That strange old man, they must be thinking, getting lost in a park not more than three minutes from his front door. The notion is dismal. But he shakes it off as he goes up the stone-paved path that feels both strange and familiar, and tries the front door.

It is locked. He reaches into his pockets; they’re empty. He tries the handle again; it’s useless. He draws his hands and arms close to his sides, like a child who has crept out of bed at night. He has no idea what to do—what he can do. His heart is trembling again. He turns on the spot, slowly, and squints at the sun.

A woman is walking up the path directly towards him. She looks old, tired, in her late fifties or so. He lifts a hand to hail her.

“Excuse me?” he calls.

She ignores him. He frowns, irritated at the slight. But no, she is coming up the path right up to the front door. He can see that she is more likely in her sixties than fifties, with wiry gray hair and a receding chin.

“Excuse me,” he says again.

“Let me get you in first, George,” she says.

As she unlocks the door, he realizes that he knows that voice. It is high, rather thin. A woman’s.

“Did you get lost again?”

He pauses at the threshold. “Again?”

She motions impatiently at him to step inside. He does.

“I guess you just had to go outside again, didn’t you?”

He turns to answer—her tone is bordering on unacceptable—but she has already gone down the hallway. He is left alone. The room is not very bright, but it is tastefully furnished with old fashioned silver ornaments on the mantel and a grandfather clock in the corner. He peers with interest at a map of Ireland on the wall. It is done beautifully in green ink, with little pictures of the Tors and places of bardic history.

Something catches his eye. The window opposite is open, and underneath waves a few blossoms. They are marigolds.

Marigold.

“Here, take this.”

He spins around to see the woman with a glass of water in her hand and pills in the other.

“What?”

“Your medicine,” she says.

He frowns, not sure if he can believe her. There are three pills in the cup of her palm, small and shaped like almonds.

“George,” she says, and her voice is suddenly different; it’s gentle, soothing, the kind only a mother could have learned. “This is your medicine, George.”

She waits, and under the endless patience of her eyes, he takes the water and holds out his other hand. She tilts her palm, and they brush skin as the pills tumble from her hand to his. The contact is like a spark. He hisses.

“Yes?” she says, suddenly, eager.

“Nothing,” he mutters, wanting to touch his head, but unable to because his hands are full. “Just…”

Her eyes, he notices, seem to have shut down. He does not like looking at them. They are, somehow, too sad, like an old and motionless painting.

He drops the pills in the water, where they fizzle, and he drinks it all in one gulp.

“Who brought you back today?” she asks from the kitchen. “Was it Eliot?”

Eliot? “It was the man who lives next door.”

In the kitchen doorway now, he can see her back stiffen. “The neighbor?” She pulls aside one of the curtains and peers out. He follows her gaze, but it’s intercepted by the waving head of gold: more marigolds.

Marigold.

She puts the glass on the rack with a loud clank. “I’ll drop by his house tonight, maybe,” she mutters. “Today, we’ve places to go.”

“Where?”

She does not answer. Perhaps it is the medicine, or perhaps it is the unforeseeable fluctuations of the day; he is beginning to remember. For example, he knows that the cabinet to the left of the sink has a collection of wine glasses. The bathroom, which he needs rather urgently, is two doors down. The woman in front of him, who is wiping her still-wet hands on her dress, her eyes fixed somewhere far behind him, is his Maddy, his wife.

“Maddy?”

She looks up at this, at him, and a ghost of a smile comes to her lips.

“You’ll see.”

She makes him bring his coat, even though it’s sunny out, and they go to the car. She takes the driver’s seat, and, though part of him, half-caught in intermittent surges of remembrance, rebels at the notion, another part is content to sit meekly at her side. And the bunch of marigolds is still fresh in the cup holder. Cheerful and a little wet. He wants to touch then, but he knows he would be touching fire. The memory is still vague, but he feels that same anxious dread; he thinks he will find out soon enough.

Through the window, he watches the road. Cars, people, trees, and sky.

—*—

The woman next to him is his wife, but he doesn’t know how he can be sure. She drives with a slight frown on her brow, concentrating on the road and ignoring him. He does not like being ignored. At the same time, he is glad she is leaving him alone and not pretending that he recalls their long years of being married, all the little habits and happenstances that make up their history. He feels safe with her without being familiar. Like an obedient child with his governess, he thinks. The lack of memory has turned him into a child.

The things he does remember have the surety of flotsam. They are little more than facts, and he is somewhat bewildered, somewhat distressed that there is no meaning to any of it. He recalls that the taste of a cookie summoned for Proust a torrent of thought. But for him, even the names themselves do nothing besides turn back and forth in his mouth.

He is George Menken Shaw. Professor of English poetry at Yale. Specialist in the works of William Butler Yeats. Driving the old BMW is Madeleine “Maddy” Shaw. They met in 1955, introduced by Madeleine’s father. Later that year, they are married. In 1957, a daughter was born, Geraldine Shaw. She died, young, from lung cancer. It must have been devastating for the family. They had no more children. George Shaw has stopped teaching. Madeleine Shaw gardens and bakes and occasionally watches the birds. Except for his receding memory, they are peaceful in their old age.

He knows this—he knows this all—but there are blanks he distrusts. He holds his mind open for names, any name at all. Gregory Shaw. Carlin Carlton. Helen Hennessey. Madeleine Schwan. He tastes them, recognizes them, discards them. They are useless to help him understand the marigolds.

He thinks of the morning’s events. He can remember the house and the room, and he knows it is his house, his livingroom, but extending his mind before that is useless. It is as though he was born into the hours.

He looks to Maddy. His wife. No longer beautiful, not even with a shadow of beauty. Gray hair in thick coils, deep lines around the mouth and eyes. Generous clothing to disguise her lumpy figure. Veined fingers, and a garish diamond ring that catches the light.

“Who was the person who showed me back today?” he asks.

“Who? Our neighbor? Steven Vanger?”

“Steven Vanger,” George mutters.

Another name to add to an already whitening list. More comes to mind: Matthew Merriman. Frederick O’Hare. Eliot.

He stops. Eliot. The name arrests him, though he doesn’t know why. It has significance; he is sure of it. He considers asking, but he shoots down the thought before he can act on it. Why, he doesn’t know. Marigold. Eliot.

The air turns gelatinous, and his head drops against his chest. He sleeps. The ride goes on forever. Once, he wakes, because the unrelenting red of the sun is shining into his eyes. He squints, turns, head still heavy, and finds himself watching the woman with the steering wheel in her hands. She does not look at him, and he does not question that she is there. One hand scratches the frizzled hair behind an ear. It makes a sandpapery sound. He grunts, squeezes his eyes shut, and drops back to sleep.

When he wakes up again, the car has stopped. He blinks, disoriented. The door opens, and a woman stands before him, her gaze turned towards the distance. He looks. The white stone rows of a cemetery sprawl before him.

“Remind me to get some cocoa on the way back,” she says. “I’ll need to find some excuse for dropping Steven Vanger a visit.”

He hesitates. Suddenly he does not know who this woman is, if she is addressing him, if she even expects a response. She turns, and, he does not know why he thinks this, but her gaze seems to see it all.

“Never mind,” she says. “Take the marigolds when you come out, will you?”

He obeys, bewildered, and holds the bunch of flowers tightly in his hand.

—*—

The evening has turned cold, and he is grateful for the coat. When he looks down, he notices that the collar is fraying. The cuffs, he can feel, have the softness that come only from years of wear. It is odd to be donning someone else’s coat, he thinks, and one that is obviously so beloved.

“Here.”

He looks up, uncertain. “What?”

The woman—Maddy—holds out a cluster of flowers for him. He recognizes them as marigolds.

“Your turn,” she says. “Go on.”

He obeys, hesitant. In the last few hours, he has been told that his name is George Shaw and that the stranger before him is his wife. She has wiry gray hair. A thin, high voice. They have been married, she says matter-of-factly, for over forty years. He does not know if he can believe her, but he is a bird in water, a fish hung in air. She could tell him that the earth is a flat sheet of steel, and he would have no choice but to accept it.

“It’s this one,” she says, pointing to a tombstone, one among many. “She was our daughter,” she adds.

He nods, wishing that he remembers. Slowly, because bending makes his back tremble, he puts down the marigolds. The previous cluster of flowers is in his wife’s hand. The heads droop and are almost brown; he guesses that they were from three or four days ago. He wonders if he had been there then, too.

“Remembering all that shaken hair, and how the wingéd sandals dart…”

He looks at her sharply. “What?”

“It’s a poem.” A pause, and she adds, as though making a suggestion, “It’s Yeats.”

She waits, and even though there is a roaring at the back of his mind, the feeling that he is trembling at a precipice, nothing comes.

“Well,” she says with a shrug, “never mind.”

She turns. He lingers, reads over the inscription again, wishing furiously that something would come to his mind. The words idly cross his eyes: Geraldine Maria Shaw. 1957 – 1992. Beloved daughter.

He lifts his eyes. They are not alone. Approaching is a man, whose hesitance catches his attention.

“Ah, Eliot,” says Maddy from behind him. Her tone is cool, unfriendly, and familiar all at once. “How are you?”

George turns. The stranger searches his face. He does not find what he is looking for, and the startling green eyes shut down.

“Hello Madeleine,” says Eliot. He is slender, hair whitening at the temples, well kept in late forties or early fifties. His voice is warm; it is both rough and pleasant, and the accent is familiar and strange all at once. He wants to say there is Irish in it, but there is something eastern in it too, perhaps, he thinks, a touch of Russian.

He turns, hesitates. “Hello, George.”

“Hello—Eliot, is it?” George replies quickly.

Eliot seems to retreat at this response. George hides a frown. He does not understand. It is almost as though the other man were afraid of him, or disappointed. Eliot looks past him, and George, following it, realizes that Maddy and Eliot are exchanging a look.

“Well,” says Eliot. He nods, wordless. “I hope you two are having a good evening.”

“We are,” says Maddy. She sticks her hands into her pocket, an ungraceful movement that makes her look like a gardener. “How’re Thomas and Louise?”

“They’re good.” Eliot looks uncertain. “Was it bad today?” he asks.

George turns to his wife. The conversation is completely unintelligible to him, but he cannot help feeling that it concerns him.

“Worse than yesterday,” Maddy says. “But, you know how it is.”

Eliot nods, shrugs his shoulders, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, and George is made momentarily breathless by how beautiful the movement is.

“Well, good night.”

“Good night,” says Maddy.

He wants to stop Eliot, but it is impossible. He watches the man walk down the road and pass the tombstones, his head bowed like an altar boy’s.

“George, it’s time to go.”

He turns reluctantly. After a few steps, he stops, turns. Far away, separated by the cold evening air, Eliot has turned too. It is only a moment, and they are too far apart for Eliot’s expression to be more than an imagining.

“Careful of that step,” Maddy says.

He almost trips, but Maddy’s words come just in time. It is as though she was waiting for it.

They reach the parking lot. It is empty except for the old BMW. It occurs to George that Eliot walked in the opposite direction, and therefore he must not live far, for the evening has deepened considerably. Perhaps it is one of the houses on the other side of the fence that separates the living from the dead.

Suddenly, as he reaches for the car door, he sees, in his mind, an open porch, warm in the summer afternoon. Sunlight catches the rosé in a glass, and there is the smell of Italian cooking, of basil and baked cheese. He sits in a cushioned chair, hearing the squeak of woven straw and another man’s deep laughter, a voice mingling two startlingly different accents…

“We’re going, George.”

He frowns, trying to catch the image. Its presence is unexplained, like a piece of colored glass in the gutter. He feels he might have succeeded, had not the woman’s voice cut him from his thoughts.

“Where?” he asks.

“Home,” she says.

Home. Nothing comes to mind as the engine starts, nothing but a feeling of wrongful emptiness, that there should be something there.

“Who was that man?” he asks.

“Who, Eliot?”

“Yes.”

“One of your colleagues at the university.”

“University?”

“You were a professor. You taught English literature. He was a physicist.”

“Oh,” he says, not quite believing, not quite disbelieving.

They are silent for a good half hour. There is a disturbing emptiness in his memory of himself, of his wife, of the man Eliot, but he does not want to break silence in the car. The motor hum and windows make a separate world, detached from both past and future.

He turns. On his tongue is the question of how much longer they have. He pauses: her hand is the middle of a movement. It’s a pilgrimage to her wrinkled cheek, to wipe away an eyelash. Suddenly it’s another pair of hands—pale, fumbling. His daughter’s. He hears her sniffling. He smells clean linens and her hair, which hasn’t been washed since she’s entered the hospital. The future years had come, dancing to a frenzied drum. Basil and Italian cooking. A man’s hands match a laughing face, and he feels lines traced against his naked skin. They, two men, married men, are lovers.

The realization is cold water in his face. He sits back hard.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. Even to himself, it sounds heavy.

She is silent. He wonders, throat gripped by guilt, if she knows what image entered his brain. He tries to remember anything else at all. Nothing. Nothing. His wife pushes back her hair. The movement is so serene it must come from complete ignorance or complete knowledge.

“We’re about half an hour from the supermarket,” she says.

It’s a while before he can force himself to speak. “Supermarket?”

“I need cocoa for that cake,” she says.

A moment later, he remembers. “For the neighbor,” he says, and wishes he could also remember the man’s name.

—*—

She rests her hand on the steering wheel and looks at him. “So what did you remember?”

His mouth has frozen open. She waits. They are in the supermarket parking lot, and it is half past nine.

“I’m not sure,” he says.

“Mm. May I guess?”

He considers this. Nods.

“Geraldine.”

He nods again, but there’s hesitation in the movement, and she catches it.

“Eliot as well?”

A fuller nod.

She sighs, looks out the window as though trying to find a good place to begin. He knows now that she must have given this explanation countless times. Perhaps every day. He waits nervously. Part of him is angry to be so helpless and blind, strapped to his seat like a prisoner; part of him remembers that he is over seventy and every bit a professor emeritus. Another part fears this strange woman, fears the truths he has no way to deny. He looks at her gray hair and downturned lips. He wonders how he could ever have married her.

“What exactly did you remember?”

He’s hesitant. “A hospital,” he says. “She was dying.”

“Do you remember of what?”

“Cancer,” he says.

Maddy nods. “Do you remember anything else?”

The smell. Her sniffling, like a girl’s footsteps down a corridor that would never end. “No, not particularly.”

She nods again. He wants to press her—he knows there is more—but he cannot, not if she might press him about—those other things, those flashes that pan unspeakably in his mind.

“And Eliot?”

He stalls. She is staring at him, and he doesn’t know if she’s seeing everything inside him or nothing at all. “We were… on his porch.”

“Yes.” A long pause. “He had a very nice porch,” she says.

He agrees. “Yes, it was very nice.”

His hands are sweaty. He’s looked away long ago, and now is concentrating on the streetlight on the corner. It glimmers, a ship on an ocean.

“You were lovers.”

Her eyes are the same—dispassionate, pitiless, unjudging.

“The two of you had an affair for almost twenty years.”

He swallows. He can feel an uncomfortable heat clawing up his neck. If he could, he’d have burst out the door and run. “And?”

“The two of you were discovered. By his wife, I might add.”

He nods. He can imagine it. A disgusting scandal of unimaginable scale. Two esteemed professors, caught in bed like teenagers.

“But it doesn’t matter.”

He looks up so quickly he thinks he has given himself whiplash. For the first time, he notices that his wife’s eyes are a hazel, like brown stars in a green brush.

“I forgave you,” she says, “a long time ago.” And it is like the end of a story; he knows nothing more will be said unless he wheedles for a repeat like a child in bed, or begs for a change in an ending that is as fixed as the mist on the car window, the clammy sweat in his palms and under his arms. It is possible that this is the end. He knows that if he lets it go, she will let it go, too, and he will forget by tomorrow. But something stops him. She is waiting to see if he will ask, and when she sees the troubled hesitation in his eyes, she says nothing, does nothing but wait some more.

“But Marigold—”

How quickly, he thinks, comes the name to his lips.

“She didn’t like it that you were having an affair,” Maddy says carefully. “It was also when she was fighting the cancer that it was discovered.” The words are carefully measured. “You blame yourself for upsetting her when she was already in a bad situation. You blame yourself for her not making it.”

She stops. She does not say, But it’s not true, the cancer was terminal, they found out too late, she wouldn’t have made it even if you’d stayed faithful all these years. She does not say, Your daughter forgave you in the end. She has stopped like the oracle, delivering only what is useful in executing the gods’ cruel will.

George, feeling the weight of it bear down like a stone harness, sits back and stares at the glove compartment. It shouldn’t matter, since he can’t remember. He is a man without memories, without a past, without the language with which he can explain himself. He has only the present and its rapid transience. He doesn’t believe he deserves the liberating catharsis of guilt and sorrow. But it’s there. How many times has he felt this? How many more?

The trip home is silent, and Maddy points him to his room, which is separate, though adjoining, to hers. She goes to the only bathroom in the house in order to wash her face and her feet. He knows the knowledge will disappear by morning—and with it, the anguish, the guilt. But he has to try.

There is an opened envelope from today’s mail on the table, and he finds a pen in the drawer.

Your name is George Shaw, he writes. He thinks he has a middle name, but for the moment, he can’t remember. You have wronged your wife greatly. It seems silly, and he knows it is useless. But he can’t not try. Ask Marigold for forgiveness.

—*—

Morning finds him in a strange bed. He frowns, disoriented. He does not know where he is. The sheets are soft but unfamiliar. It’s late in the morning. He swings his legs out of bed—slowly, because the joints in his hip are not well—and blinks at the opened envelope on the bedside.

Your name is George Shaw, he reads. You have wronged your wife greatly. Ask Marigold for forgiveness.

He stares for a good minute. The words are oddly familiar, but he doesn’t know why. He has no idea who George Shaw is (him?), nor Marigold (Shaw’s wife?). The names echo at the back of his mind; perhaps if he thinks harder, they will come…

Some time later, he leaves the room. There are clothes in a chair, and he has put them on. Down the hall, he can hear the clanging of dishware, and a soft humming. It is both pleasant and musical, but he does not expect to find it coming from an old woman with a purple hairnet and fluffy slippers on her feet.

“Good morning,” she greets him, as though they were old friends.

“Good morning,” he says. He looks around. There’s breakfast on the table, set for two.

“Would you like some marmalade?”

He is uncertain, still puzzled, but he nods cautiously. “Yes, please.”

She takes out the pot and a butter knife. “This is your house, by the way,” she says. “You have a memory condition, so you don’t remember things too well.”

“Oh,” he says. It is a while before he has comprehended this. “May I ask your name?”

“Maddy,” she says. She’s poured coffee, which he refuses. She seems to be expecting that. “And you’re George.”

George. After a moment, he remembers the message at his bedside, and wonders, with a sinking of his stomach, if the rest of it is true.

He must work up his courage before he can speak again.

“Am I married?”

“Yes,” Maddy replies.

“Is my wife still…”

“Still alive? Yes.”

He digests this.

“Is her name Marigold?”

“No,” said Maddy. “Marigold is your daughter’s nickname.”

He nods. Briefly, when he is not staring at the crumbs on the table, he catches her eyes. They are patient, unhurried. “I found a note on my bedside when I woke.”

“Yes?”

After he tells her its contents, she hums and nods. It is as though she expected it. “Well, what would you like to know?”

He asks.

“You had an affair while you were married,” Maddy answers. “Your daughter didn’t take well to it, and…” She trails off with a nonchalant gesture. Scrape, goes the butter knife. Scrape, scrape.

He frowns. It is like hearing the story of another life. “Where are they now?”

“Not here.”

“May I see them?”

Maddy smiles. “I’d advise eating your toast first. It’s getting cold.”

By the time he’s finished spreading the marmalade, Maddy has already put away her plate, and is standing in front of the kitchen window. He follows her gaze. It rests on the wide-open lawn of the house next door. A car, with a make George can’t remember having seen before, but which he suspects is one of those things young people like to buy, pulls up to the driveway.

Maddy is speaking, but almost too quietly for him to hear. “Eggs, cocoa…” She pauses. “We might not have enough butter.”

Two men come out of the car. He was right: they’re in their late twenties or early thirties. The toast is at his mouth, and he nearly bites his tongue because the two men have stepped close to each other and exchanged a quick kiss.

He hears Maddy muffling a laugh. She gives him a glance, one that he finds inscrutable, and then turns her gaze back to the neighbors, who have gone into the house.

He goes back to spreading marmalade before she can catch his eyes again. He feels unsettled, though he does not know why. No, he does not know, not exactly.

“Well, I suppose he’ll have someone to share his cake with.”

He looks up. “What?”

“Mr. Vanger,” Maddy says. She nods at the window. “I am baking him a cake today,” she adds matter-of-factly.

He listens to this, accepts this as he accepts everything else he has heard.

“Would you like to help?”

“Uh…”

Again, there’s the hint of a smile as she takes out a pan from the cabinet. Her movements are slow; he wonders just how old she is. He also wonders, though not too much, who she is.

“There are some books you might like in the other room,” she says, pointing. “Now, if you’re done with these plates…?”

He follows where she points, and enters a well-furnished room. Soon, he is deeply absorbed in the books that have been left, half read, on the table. A feeling of half-familiarity pervades him, and he chases it from page to page.

“I’ll be right back,” he hears Maddy call from the other room. “I’m delivering cake, if you’re curious.”

He grunts in response, and then, remembering that he doesn’t know who Maddy is, that she might be a mere stranger who has taken him into her care, replies, “I hope they like it.”

The moment she’s gone, he sets down the book and goes into the hall. He makes a wrong turn first, entering what he supposes is Maddy’s bedroom, before he finds the one he woke up in. He stops in the doorway. The envelope is gone. The pen is still there, but the bedside table is bare. He looks on the floor, slowly and without expecting to find it; there is only one explanation for its absence.

He is in the hallway when the door turns. Maddy enters without seeing him, and he can’t help standing in silence, watching her take out a torn envelope from her pocket, enter the kitchen, and drag out a chest from behind the toaster. She unlocks it. It is stuffed with papers, some whole, some the torn edges of sheets. His envelope joins them, and he doesn’t leave when she looks up.

For the first time he can remember, she hesitates. And then it’s over, and there is only a wry smile. She takes out the key and leaves the kitchen.

“Some things are worth keeping,” she says, and for a moment he wonders if she expects him to respond, for her eyes are trained on his. Hazel eyes, like a starburst of brown. Then she is gone, walking past him down the hall.

Image: Red Canna, by Georgia O'Keeffe

© 2008 Corvus

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